The inventor of the black box was told to drop the idea
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Instead, a lot of effort goes into trying to reconstruct this.
Just put a dang video camera in the cockpit.
I've also, for decades, advocated a camera that records flight operations at an airport. Just stick a couple in the tower pointed at the runways. Note that in the Concorde disaster, there was no video of the take-off. They had to rely on eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. The only video came later from some passenger in a car who happened to have a video cam at hand. That accidental video proved valuable. (It's a horrifying video.)
I was surprised at all the vitriol opposition to pointing a camera at the runways. People confidently told me it would cost millions of dollars, and was completely infeasible. Jeez, anyone could buy a security camera that recorded on a loop for a few hundred. Every convenience store had them.
Also video occupies much more data than most other streams of information stored on blackbox. This coupled with the fact that anything aviation related takes decades to get into widespread use and it was only quite recently that solid state storage became so dense and ubiquitous.
Video surveillance at airports is getting more widespread, just search for SFO asiana.
As for video, VHS quality is about 1Gb per hour. Meaning you can put 64 hours on an ordinary USB stick about the size of my thumbnail. Furthermore, video recording has nothing to do with flying the airplane, so there are no safety/certification issues. It doesn't even have to be in a crashproof box.
I know that airports now have video surveillance, but those cameras are pointed mostly at the tarmac for security purposes, not at the runways for flight ops.
Just make a secure bracket for it, and a 12V feed.
Even the nuts and bolts that go on aircraft can cost >$100. The problems are not all bureaucratic, and I get HN's hate of bureaucracy but for life-and-death matters - I'd rather default to caution than move fast and break necks attitude of SV/Tech.
Just to give you an example, lookup the swissair in-flight entertainment fire incident. Tacking couple of screens and media server onto an existing plane should be fine right? turns out not really and 215 people paid the price of that decision with their lives.
Privacy aside, being watched does affect decision making.
If you think recording people at their jobs will make things safer, why not apply it for the least safe mode of transportation first - why doesn't the gov/NHTSA mandate a video and data recorder in your car and the police and insurance can take a look at it next time you crash to decide who/what caused it.
Walter Bright is an aerospace engineer, programmer of flight critical systems of airliners, son of Charles Bright. You are way off on your accusation.
citation: https://www.amazon.ca/Jet-Makers-Charles-Bright-ebook/dp/B00...
Any time I enter a bus in my town, I see that it has a number of cameras, which point to the road, to the passengers, and to the driver as well. Why should a plane be different?
I'm not super familiar with this one, but based on a quick skim of the TSB report (http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/1998/a98h...) it looks like the issue here was not the IFE itself but a poor installation that significantly differed from the certified configuration and resulted in chafing on power wires.
It's also worth noting that this happened in the '90s when networked personal IFE systems were still in their infancy. It's 2021, there are no unsolved problems in installing a few cameras in an aircraft. A lot of them already have cameras accessible through the IFE, putting one more in the cockpit and a hardened DVR in the back isn't exactly rocket science.
Yes, aviation stuff often has a few zeroes added on to the price tag for good and bad reasons, but we're basically talking about a dashcam here. Low triple digit prices for non-aviation hardware, so even if you multiply the price times 100 it's still not really significant compared to the cost of an airliner.
There are no good technical reasons to not have video.
The automakers were already "voluntarily" putting EDRs in cars, so no need to mandate it.
From 15 years ago, standards were set so that data can be retrieved after an accident and such:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/fmvss/EDRFinalRu...
I think we can say that when you have hundreds of people's lives in your hands you are accepting a higher level of oversight and invasion of privacy.
The same reason some people in some careers have to go through deeply invasive background checks.
I agree that a hardened process relying on multiple SSD (that are then uploaded and wiped after landing at an airport) would be a good technical direction.
An office is a shared environment, usually not owned by the people who work there, that exists only for job related activities. Just like companies can monitor your company issued email, network traffic and cell phone, they can monitor your activities in the workspace.
I'm a privacy advocate, I avoid Google and Facebook as much as I can, but even I understand the difference between private and professional life. One has an assumption of privacy, the other doesn't.
In the US I see cameras at every gas station, donut shop, drug store, liquor store, and lab I go into. None of these places are as high stakes or high security as an airport.
Casinos do it. Banks do it. Convenience stores do it. The TSA records it's workers and you when you go through security. This doesn't seem like much of a hurdle.
For example: https://www.jwincorporated.com/projects/ohare-international-...
Not so for someone flying several tons of metal that will absolutely fuck up the lives of many people if they aren't paying full attention.
It probably isn't that easy, at least for the runways. Remember that Uber crash where they tried to convince everyone that the cyclist was near impossible to see? The dash cam used to record that video was standard, but also completely unable to handle even a well lit road at night. Good cameras and the weather proofing they need out in the open (they should still work after a snow storm) will cost a lot more, probably not infeasible but still a decent amount of cash.
He suggest to put one in the tower. There's no need to weather proof anything, or else poor controllers ;). In theory the tower see the runways well enough, or else the airport isn't well designed and the tower doesn't fill its own purpose.
> The dash cam used to record that video was standard, but also completely unable to handle even a well lit road at night.
Weren't we still able to see the cyclist? Weren't we able to boost the contrast to see her even better?
Sorry for the sarcasm, but even the worst camera show more than no camera at all... You can't argue that seeing a cyclist badly is worse than not seeing that same cyclist at all.
All it takes is a 100$ camera and you would get so much more evidence.
Surely you've seen CCTV or other cameras in an outdoor enclosure before? You are being tracked from parking lot to boarding in some airports. We can put a few cameras up to watch the runways and taxiways.
https://airportimprovement.com/article/new-camera-system-ena...
Imagine the footage of the average shop robbery, which most of the time is already useless. And UFOs.
Why the scare quotes? It would be literally never reviewed unless incident occurs, as it would be on overwriting loop.
Way ahead of you on that one.
From TFA: "civil authorities said that “Dr Warren’s instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aircraft.” The Royal Australian Air Force likewise decided that “such a device is not required—the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations.”
Well. No. Multiple air crashes across the world relied on recordings as a key part of their investigation. Especially when a plane lands in the Hudson, just to name one example.
This is very telling:
"Most damning was the Federation of Air Pilots, which declared that the device would be like “a spy flying alongside—no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.”
History wasn't kind here either. Just try and take off in a jet from a commercial airliner without the various safety equipment installed. The insurance companies alone will try to eat you alive, let alone every other agency.
There's definitely a repeating theme around safety equipment and authority/authority figures. The ridicule at the start is definitely a common starting point. Seat belts and air bags were both ridiculous inventions. Then they weren't. Then they became required.
Quote from elsewhere and not necessarily about flight recorders: "It has been said that any new idea must pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is subject to argument: third, it is accepted. The safety idea has reached the final stage. It is accepted." -- Earl B. Morgan, journal of Safety Engineering, 1917
Also, if I was a pilot, I would appreciate the fact that the black box can potentially help my friends and family get closure, because if the black box survives then my friends and family can learn what happened that caused the crash.
In the aviation world, people aren't at fault. Processes are.
Howard Aiken
"The statement evolved from a large family of sayings that originated in the nineteenth century. In 1918 a closely similar remark emerged in a speech by Nicholas Klein, a union representative. Gandhi discussed stages that a movement passes through in a collection of writings he published in 1921, but his words did not really match the target expression."
Reviewer: drop it.
Inventor: this is a safety feature that will allow us to iterate plane design and save thousands of lives in the future!
Reviewer: drop it.
Inventor: this is extremely important for the future of aviation!
Reviewer: drop it.
Inventor: I WILL NOT storms off
Reviewer: I just meant...show that it won't break? Never mind.
The moral of these stories is that originality scares the shit of people. Good ideas are not immediately apparent.
The myth of the inventor-founder is something from the industrual age. Interesting how it still persists.
Anyone can imagine a "flying car" or a "nuclear fusion reactor". It is a completely different thing having and putting the resources to work: the people, the effort, the money and the time to make something real.
Someone just "having an idea" only works in science fiction, and even there you need to do the work of writing the book, or drawing the comic.
If there is a myth here, it is that it matters who executed it first. It's random.
Disney - animated feature length film with sound, dogged vision of founder
Post / Kelloggs - invention of breakfast cereal, invented by founder (Kellogg's invention stolen by Post)
Carnegie steel - bridge prototype, highly risky and innovative endeavor
Ford - division of labor
Mars - caramel and nougat in chocolate, innovation over Hersheys' plain chocolate, invented by founder
Google - pagerank, invented by founders
He can and should be credited with applying these innovations at scale and ironing out various kinks in the process and popularizing these concepts, but it would be a lie to call it "Ford's innovation", all these things you mention were initially invented by others, although Ford did manage the practical implementation of all these innovations in combination unusually well.
> Interestingly, modern flight data recorders are required to have an underwater locator beacon that pulses once per second at 37.5 kilohertz for 30 days and is supposed to be detectable at depths of at least 14,000 feet (4,267 meters). But they don’t have comparable beacons for crashes on land.
After Japan Airlines Flight 123, that is shocking to me.
Well, they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...
But the reason you need underwater beacons in particular is that the water absorbs RF signals, so you'll actually use acoustic beacons underwater. Such a device would be useless above the water since air is so much less dense.
Total guess, of course.
You might be surprised how scant and expensive bandwidth becomes once you are out of sight of land
I had no idea that was how recordings were (or at least could) be made at the time. Of course it makes sense-- early use of magnetic tape was something like nickel coated bronze, so there's no reason a wire couldn't also work.
Just a bit of electronics history I wasn't aware of that I thought interesting.
Later recorders used plastic tape but also have a water vessel. As the water boils it keeps the interior from going above 100C - until it boils away. The recorders are rated for maybe 30-60 minutes of direct exposure.
Recent recorders use solid state storage and, still, water to keep the internal temperature lower.
I wonder how soon a car would be able to publish its metrics, like speed, motor rpm, data from ABS and brakes, etc via a protected Bluetooth channel, so that a dashcam or a phone could keep recording it, like the black box.
You can already get those metrics from the car's OBD2 port.
There are even dongles which have Bluetooth so you can see/record the metrics on your phone, so it shouldn't take much to get them on a dashcam.
I think the FAA’s approach of “we do accident investigations so we learn, not to blame” went pretty far in making the idea more acceptable.
Looking back, almost every great idea I’ve had has received negative support from people around me, who either didn’t understand it or had their own plans for me.
In countries with French-style law, that might be different for pilots. (Essentially you're guilty until proven innocent, and they hire a retired judge with nothing better to do except to drag out the hearings (and fees) until they die.)
However the scale has tipped recently in the US with a central pilot records database being created recently. So at every step of your career, you're recorded and tracked. If an employer doesn't like you, they can scribble whatever they want in your permanent government record now.
So before a pilot candidate spends $200,000 on a college education and pilot training, they need to think about both losing their medical at any time, and what will happen if their airline decides to fire them and give them a hard time.
In my country Loss of License insurance removes that as a risk for pilots.